Never Need To Know
by Japonica
Summary: After the war they were never the same again. How Ron copes after Voldemort’s reign of terror.


Never Need To Know

There was something soothing about the rhythmic beeps and the chatter that engulfed him.

Ron hadn't liked his job to start off with; he was just another employee, just another cashier, serving just another customer in a never-ending queue. Perhaps because he had been fighting all of his life to become a 'someone', being a Muggle Supermarket cashier just didn't make him feel whole.

After Voldemort's reign of terror, Ron was left with very little. Sister dead, three brothers dead, parents dead. Harry was alive, somewhere, though Ron didn't know where, and the last time he had heard from him (over a fuzzy mobile phone conversation) Harry had been working near Bath doing God-knows-what. Hermione was another he didn't see, and hardly ever heard from; George told him that she had been in Suffolk researching something-or-another.

The trouble with having Voldemort dead was that people like himself and his remaining brothers didn't have much of an inclination to use magic or to live the life they once had. A life that his parents had enjoyed despite the threat of war hanging over them, like a guillotine waiting to fall.

Muggles, Ron had soon discovered when he turned nineteen, still had wars, still had violence and hatred, and yet it didn't seem to cripple everyone and everything around them. Most people seemed to just get on with their lives; they were vaguely thankful to the nameless, faceless people who kept them safe, but other than that, nothing changed within Britain, even if the rest of the world suffered.

Ron had wanted that: he for the first time in his life, he wanted to be anonymous, to be just another person who couldn't get picked out in the crowd, to be safe. In the Wizarding World it had been dangerous even to have red hair, because wizards being so few, everyone knew who was alive and who was dead in the end because everyone recognised each other and from that information Voldemort knew who was left opposing him. Knew, and slaughtered them and their families.

Ron pulled himself out of his melancholy state and plastered a fake smile on his face as he greeted the next customer. This job wasn't supposed to be difficult, but sometimes summoning a grin and a cheerful conversation abandoned him and he was left pale and restless.

He needed someone, someone like Harry by his side again. Harry had once been able to sense his every mood, then calm him down, or say something sarcastic to make him smile. However, with so many years past, so little contact, Ron couldn't even begin to try to imagine what the hell they would talk about, except for the stale and very customary "So how have you been? What have you been doing? How's life been treating you?" phrases that everyone asked and hardly anyone cared to know the answer to.

"What about Hermione," George had asked on one occasion, "why not go and see her? You used to fancy her, you might get a girlfriend who lasts over three months if you started going out…" But Ron had refused flat out. Hermione, however much she had made his teenage hormones roar, probably wouldn't do so now. Plus the fact he had no interest in seeing her again.

Her face along with Harry's brought back memories that Ron just didn't want to remember. He wasn't used to being gloomy, it was in his nature to crack jokes and be in high spirits, but in their presence he knew that he would be bad company indeed.

They obviously thought along the same lines, they hadn't contacted him or each other as far as he knew. Harry sometimes rang him up, mobile phone cutting out when either of them felt the silence start to stifle them, and then on the next time he rang blaming the abrupt ending of the conversation with lame excuses of phone batteries and loss of signal.

Even with the loss of his best friends, Ron was quite content. He lived in a minuscule flat in (just another) block of flats in the heart of Manchester with his older broth George who, with the loss of his twin, had clung to Ron and not yet let go. He went out on Saturdays, drank and watched football. He went to work, quite content that as a lowly cashier, he was safe from people remembering his name, face, and family.

It had been hard at first, of course, adjusting to this new life of things he should know about but didn't. Though Ron felt that, after six years of being a Muggle, that he was pretty adept now.

Some things like being able to state every Quidditch player from the '94 World Cup might never leave him, but now that the Wizarding World had abolished itself, places like Diagon Alley empty and in disrepair, Ron would never need to again.

Never need to know about the world he had grown up in, adored, and hated in the end.

Never need to know about the few people who had survived, with their minds though perhaps not their bodies intact.

Never need to know about how he could still feel his magic sometimes, rushing though his veins, hoping for some sort of outlet.

Never need to know about the dreams that haunted him from time to time. When the shadows loomed and he could remember the prickling sensation of being watched, whilst you waited for death.

In this world at least, he'd never need to know about anything.

* * *

Any feedback would be very much appreciated.


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